And so it’s no surprise that in relatively few months this practice turned to skill, skill to cleanliness, order, and in short, constancy, so that the old man would have taken up his messenger routes again, had he not already begun to concern himself like a grandfather with the young lady’s approaching delivery. “You know,” he said one day, “I’ll tell the midwife. Then you’ll be taken care of.” And even as he said that, he was already standing at the door in his large curved hat, his vest, and his long coat, already reaching out with his hand and his tall walking stick toward the road that led through the forest. “Yes,” he said, already on his way, since like most old people he didn’t listen to others, but simply spoke into the shapeless world of his soul. For the soul has already begun its journey with Father Charon, even as the man lives on for months and years in his house, going his own way and doing as he pleases, as people do.
Now the woman was alone.
She was called Julia, and sometimes other things as well. It had turned out that she still had a wooden suitcase filled with clothes, and even a small sum in the bank, one day the postman had brought her the interest. But it made no impression on her. Things lay where they lay, and that one green dress seemed to have grown stuck to her body. But now, hardly had the old man disappeared when a strange eagerness overtook her. She cut up a shirt, following a paper pattern that she had trimmed to size — (she couldn’t even really quite imagine just how big a newborn child was). — Then she took a very soft bed sheet and hemmed its edges to make diapers. In between, she reaped, she milked, she weeded the garden, and she made the soup for supper. But when the old man came home, there was already an armful of children’s clothing there, finished and unfinished. And he looked on this accomplishment with satisfaction, for somehow he knew that it was an achievement for her, and he was pleased that she had taken his hint. She had now been brought into the order of the world, and the old man, if he hadn’t been so old, would have had to free her from it again. For he had enough insight to understand that such a thing was required in order for this wounded soul to be fully reconciled, even if he was not the man to do it. He understood that. For this creature still spoke no more than those few words that came naturally. And this troubled him, for she was young and must have wanted to speak. But she wasn’t sad, either. On the contrary: she gave her consent in advance to everyone and to everything that happened. But there was something that she lacked, something that is part of human life in general, even if it is not a noble quality: a certain and ungrateful joyfulness; that was what she lacked. Yes, she even said so herself. She was lacking something.
It was as if a soul only inhabited this body by chance. And each lived separately, for itself. And that was why it took so long to bring her actions into accord with her nature, and that was why it was surely no mere coincidence that she had met this ancient but hearty messenger, who became her master.
One evening the old man went out again on the country road. But he had already summoned a neighbor, a woman with ten children. She was milking now, and preparing the coffee, real coffee, and there was also a tall copper pail full of water over the fire; most likely the bath for the child that was to come. . She looked at the little clothes. Oh God, the little shirt was much too small! The girl was still so lacking in common sense, though she would soon become a mother. But fortunately the farmer’s wife didn’t know that the girl had sewn it herself. And besides, this poor farm wife, too, had been well schooled by fate, so that even if she had known the truth, it would only have caused her a bit of pain, or incomprehension. Indeed, she would simply have sacrificed some of her own children’s clothing, as hard as this would have been for her; even if (as was in fact the case) it were only a trade. Indeed, even if (as was also the case) she had failed, as always, to keep this story to herself, and had gossiped about it in the village, and even shown everyone the tiny shirt, inhumanly smalclass="underline" still it would have been a good deed, and still the girl would have repaid this act of kindness.
For keeping silent is too great a task for many people, it’s too much to ask of every third person. And comprehension, to begin with, is only the palate of our understanding, but the palate is connected to the tongue. And the tongue — ordinarily — (once it has understood): speaks. This is the way of the world.
But as I’ve said, it’s already quite a feat when the tongue is no longer simply the tongue, or the understanding, when instead it transforms itself again into heart and hand. And so the girl had cause to rejoice when the farmer woman came by with three little smocks and two shirts. For there was poverty on both sides, if not the same poverty. And the farmer woman felt secure by comparison to her sister in suffering. But the latter, as she slowly began to feel the terrifying travails of childbirth, felt a sort of horror at this mother of ten children. Nature tore this creature into four parts, if only in her pained imagination. Julia, I must resolve to call her by name again, gripped the edges of the straw bed with her hands, her outermost ends. Her feet were stretched out like a dead woman’s. Her head was turned back, as if it were no longer a part of her body. But now and then she went limp again and lay there like a weary animal dropping off to sleep. And in this, nature does not distinguish between a princess and a beggar woman. And if the princess demands a narcotic, it seems to me that this makes her more perishable than a plant, which, in its metamorphosis, breaks the capsule of its bud with its own strength, its final burst of living and dying. It is no coincidence that the landscape of the earth is identical to that of the heart. Outside, as the first snow fell, coming late this year, it quickly melted again and ran in many rivulets down the street. It was night, but like that summer night, the day of a night. But somewhat bleaker, befitting the season. You could forget to look up at the stars, because they appeared not only far away, but also very small. Inside the room everything seemed paralyzed, for as soon as other people make use of our belongings before our eyes (and all the more so when they wish to help us), those objects fall dead, and against our will we think of how it shall be here when we ourselves have died.
The door of the cottage opened. The midwife was there, and she set down her things. And the old messenger, who was satisfied now and had intended to go to his bedroom, remained standing, as if rooted in the open doorway. It was as if he needed to go out to the road again, to stay outside, to wander outside forever. And it was already night, with the stars in their dazzling splendor, detached from the world down below. Oh, how alone we can be. There was a cry. But not a cry of pain, rather, it was the sound of something splitting apart, and a child’s cry entered the world. It ruled over this world for a moment like a flash of lightning. Thinking and feeling are no longer just thinking and feeling. And even if there was only a single small lamp burning there, now the black of the darkness itself — as peculiar as it may sound — boldly came to light. It was not clear if this was death or life. The old man sat broken on the edge of his bed, while in the living room someone spoke and someone answered. It must have been the midwife and the farmer’s wife. But after a while there were four and then five voices, the mother and the child had joined the conversation. As if they had both been born.